How Jurny is bringing AI to Hospitality

All right, Luca, if you could do me a massive favor, just tell everybody, tell all the viewers, all the listeners, all the watchers, a little bit about Journey, a little bit about you and how you got this job.

Yeah, thank you for, for having me. Yes. Like I'm co founder and CEO of Journey. I, I was born and raised in Italy. To just give you a bit background about myself, moved to, to us specifically LA. This is about 2008, a couple of years after I moved there. This was like early Airbnb and there was not much done online in terms of short term rentals. And one of the things I realized is that short term rentals, especially for luxury villas, was done all through brokers. And if you search for luxury villas online, you couldn't find really anything. So I launched the, that's how I got involved in the industry is by seeing this problem, launching a landing page. And literally this is one of the first company doing Google Ads for luxury villas in LA. That landing page did over $1.2 million in revenue net to us on the first year. And yeah, that was the very, very beginning of the industry. Obviously short lived like within, within a spasm of 12 months we had some, something like maybe 15 competitors, including like one fine stay luxury treat a bunch of other companies. But that really hooked me into the industry. And from there, obviously since, since it became a pretty crowded pretty quickly, I spin off a management company with the idea of utilizing technology to make that business as well, scalable as possible. A company at the time was called Gas Wiser, grew that company to 300 units across six different cities in US and in the process of doing that, I built a massive amount of frustration in trying to make different technologies working together. I've been a customer of many PMS companies and I've been trying to make him work, you know, things like access control system alongside with the guest verification system, pricing, different type of IoT and different type of OTAs all work as a single system.

What is your USP? What's your elevator pitch? Because you know, as we, as we all know in this game, there's a lot of choice. There is a lot of choice out there. So how does Journey separate itself from everybody else? What's your unique selling point? Your taxi pitch? Elevator pitch?

Yeah, I can give you the other pitch, but I want to say something to answer your first question. How we separate ourselves from everybody. And that's by creating an alternative to this very messy, fragmented environment. So when you want to create a finite environment, we want to create a full alternative to everything else. So we say, hey, instead of you trying to figure out all on your own, we have done that for you. So we took a completely different concept and idea of how things have been done. Right? Like if you go to a pms, the general pms, the idea is that they connect with as many service providers as possible. We want to have as many verticals as possible, but we want to have maximum one or two providers per vertical. And the reason being is because if you have pricing, if you have channel manager and if you have guest verification system, access control system, IoTs, like all these different verticals and you choose multiple providers per vertical, this system are not going to work well with one another because the combinations are almost infinite. There's a very technical problem with a very user and problem. The technicality is that you only understand that when you've tried to build different systems on top of typical PMSs and you understand that that's not going to work. And it will work for a percentage of the industry. But I think it's the minority. But it's very much like full customizations. But then you have to have very high technical knowledge or have a finite product. A perfect example is the Apple product, right? Apple. That's exactly what they do, and that's the reason why a lot of people have iPhones is because it's a finite amount of solutions that you can have by doing that. Those solutions are built specifically for that platform. Number one, those solutions work well together. You don't get viruses, you don't get bugs or limited amount of bugs. And so all of those things comes as a big advantage. That's exactly what we did. We chose one vendor per category, usually sometimes two. And we go as deep as possible with those vendors. So for instance, for pricing we chose Wheelhouse. And you have 100% of wheelhouse functionality embedded inside of our system, right? And then we did the same thing with auto host out host is fully embedded inside of our system. Now back in January already did with ChatGPT, we created our own AI which we will probably get more details on the AI side, but that's fully embedded into the system. And so as a user you really need to learn one system, not multiple. And you can upgrade, downgrade, whatever service you want. The frustrating part of what's happening in our industry is if you are a user today and you want to come into the industry, or even if you're a large user. But let's take the example of somebody that just started, they have to do weeks long of months Long of research, research of who they want to use once they choose who to use. It's weeks long of onboarding for your pms, weeks long of onboarding for any service that you want to use and making sure that it's integrated with pms. We just removed entirely all of that for our system is a one click process. What we are launching on the 16th of May. It's actually of potential when this goes live. Have launched on the 16th, what we call Journey 2.0. We are making it a one click process. So as long as you have an Airbnb account, you log in on your BNB account within our platform, all your information, all your settings, everything, it gets imported inside of our system and upgrading to Wheelhouse, Auto Host or access control system is as easy as one click on button. That's it.

Auto hosts, Wheelhouse, fantastic companies. How are you making this decision to go with them? Because obviously in the dynamic pricing world you've got many partners. Obviously Auto Host has many different partners. What's the reason for going with them and why not? I guess if you're looking at the elephant in the room, why not open your services up to multiple. Because technically you could be missing out on potential customers there.

Yes, I mean it's, it's true but we say hey, the people that want to have that full level of customization, let them all be in a bucket. But it's a small bucket. That's the miss, miss I guess like misunderstanding that there's like in the industry they think that everybody wants this high level of customization when in reality people want simplifications. And, and if you look in every industry, whoever comes in and simplify things without a compromise on the end product, and that's really the challenge comes out as a winner. So, so that's what, that's what our mission is. And, and we say hey listen, the end of the day, is there really this big of a difference between pricings, pricing softwares and a little bit there is. And number one, we chose Wheelhouses. Sounds like a pay advertising for Wheelhouse, but we, we are split tested basically every pricing tool that there is on the market and Wheelhouse came out on top. That's just as simple as that. And so we chose them with the addition of hey, you know, you have to build custom API to work with us.

Luca, appreciate it. I really look forward to tapping into more of AI with you. I'll send you a message out of this because I've got a WhatsApp group just for AI chat and so love it. I'd love to have you part of it. But for everybody else, thank you so much for tuning in. As always, this is the podcast that brings you the tools, the tactics, the training and the confidence to increase your direct bookings and cut down on your over reliance on Airbnb and the OTAs. We are here three days a week, Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. It doesn't matter whether you listen on Spotify, on Apple, Android or you like to watch the videos on YouTube or or LinkedIn or any of the social medias. We are here for you. All you need to do is Google boostly go from there and choose your podcast listening of your choice. With that being said, we're going to stop today's recording. Luca, thank you. Thank you everybody for tuning in.

Having a blast gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast Bruce Lee like Bruce Lee cause it's so hard and the tea is loose leaf Making up those rhymes don't write it, just do it loosely.